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Chosen for the 2011 ASLI Choice - Honorable Mention (History Category) for a compendium of the key scientific papers that undergird the global warming forecast. Global warming is arguably the defining scientific issue of modern times, but it is not widely appreciated that the foundations of our understanding were laid almost two centuries ago with the postulation of a greenhouse effect by Fourier in 1827. The sensitivity of climate to changes in atmospheric CO2 was first estimated about one century ago, and the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration was discovered half a century ago. The fundamentals of the science underlying the forecast for human-induced climate change were being published and debated long before the issue rose to public prominence in the last few decades. The Warming Papers is a compendium of the classic scientific papers that constitute the foundation of the global warming forecast. The paper trail ranges from Fourier and Arrhenius in the 19th Century to Manabe and Hansen in modern times. Archer and Pierrehumbert provide introductions and commentary which places the papers in their context and provide students with tools to develop and extend their understanding of the subject. The book captures the excitement and the uncertainty that always exist at the cutting edge of research, and is invaluable reading for students of climate science, scientists, historians of science, and others interested in climate change.

Considering sustainability as a flawed and restrictive term in practice, Sustainable Futures for Climate Adaptation argues that we must radically adapt humanity and reform society, cities, buildings, and our approach to migration in order to coexist in harmony with our natural environments.The book conceives an Earth–human coexistence where the world's regions are shared globally between all people, in contrast to a reality where we have lost touch with the natural world. It is this decoupling of humanity and nature that has brought us to the brink of climate disaster. In response, Benedict Anderson explores the concept of ‘wearing our ecology', where human mobility is synchronized with the environment, merging people with landscapes, topographies, and geographies. Anderson argues that we need to create new migration routes for people moving between the Global South and North and establish flexible and adaptive living environments. Only by rethinking separations between urban and rural, resource extraction and consumption, racial prejudice and accessibility are we able to forge a closer partnership with nature to adapt to climate change and mitigate the worst of its effects.Touching on themes of adaptive urban design, racial and gender segregation and inequality, and climate apocalypticism, this book will be valuable reading for researchers, scholars, and upper-level students in the fields of urban studies, migration studies, human geography, ecology, politics, and design.

Industrial and agricultural greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly warming Earth's climate, unleashing rising seas, ocean acidification, melting permafrost, powerful storms, wildfires, floods, deadly heat waves, droughts, tsunamis, food shortages, and armed conflict over shrinking water supplies while reducing nutritional levels in crops. Billions of people will become climate refugees. Hotter temperatures will allow tropical diseases to spread into temperate regions. Higher levels of CO2, allergens, dust, and other particulate matter will impair our physical and mental health and even reduce our cognitive abilities. Climate change disproportionately affects the world's poor. It also harms Nature, and could ultimately trigger a sixth mass extinction. In Escaping Nature, Orrin H. Pilkey and his coauthors offer concrete suggestions for how to respond to the threats posed by global climate change. They argue that while we wait for the world's governments to get serious about mitigating climate change we can adapt to a hotter world through technological innovations, behavioral changes, nature-based solutions, political changes, and education.

In Media Hot and Cold Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal communication and comfort. Although these new media promise to help mitigate the uneven effects of climate change, Starosielski shows how they can operate as a form of biopower by determining who has the ability to control their own thermal environment. In this way, thermal media can enact thermal violence in ways that reinforce racialized, colonial, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies. By outlining how the control of temperature reveals power relations, Starosielski offers a framework to better understand the dramatic transformations of hot and cold media in the twenty-first century.

The concepts and concerns regarding the global effects of a continued increase in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have enjoyed a high visibility in newspapers and scientific journals. This concern is now being translated into big-science projects. These international projects aim to understand better the processes of climate and ecosystem changes and impacts and are being designed under the aegis of the World Climate Research Programme and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. Biological and climatic systems are intertwined in processes leading to impacts and feedbacks and so it has emerged that climatologists, atmospheric scientists, terrestrial and marine ecologists must collaborate in research programmes, else the bases of their future projections are incomplete. This special volume of Advances in Ecological Research brings together eight papers which propose and demonstrate the two major components of current climate change research, future prediction and interdisciplinary approach.

Global climate during the Quaternary has been deeply influenced by glacial-interglacial oscillations. As a result, the Earth has experienced alternations between warm and stable climatic periods – coinciding with interglacials, and cold and highly variable climatic intervals – coinciding with glacials. In a suborbital timescale, climate oscillations were maximal during glacial onsets and, very especially, during deglaciations. Previous deglaciation events were associated with diverse changes in earth's atmospheric, physical and biotic environments and an examination of such interrelationships requires the establishment of a competent temporal framework. Accordingly, chapter one examines dating methods that can be used to provide temporal constraints to continental deglaciation events. To illustrate the range of considerations that could accompany a deglaciation dating study, the chapter also gives a brief outline of a case study conducted in western Canada to constrain the Late Pleistocene retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet from the region. Chapter Two reports on the influence of deglaciations in the mid-latitude European climate. Chapter Three aims to highlight the influence of global and regional paleoceanographic changes on the deglaciation of the marine based Barents ice sheet since the last glacial maximum (LGM) until the onset of marine environment in the Holocene.

For centuries, scientists have been fascinated by the role of the Sun in the Earth's climate system. Recent discoveries, outlined in this book, have gradually unveiled a complex picture, in which our variable Sun affects the climate variability via a number of subtle pathways, the implications of which are only now becoming clear. This handbook provides the scientifically curious, from undergraduate students to policy makers with a complete and accessible panorama of our present understanding of the Sun-climate connection. 61 experts from different communities have contributed to it, which reflects the highly multidisciplinary nature of this topic. The handbook is organised as a mosaic of short chapters, each of which addresses a specific aspect, and can be read independently. The reader will learn about the assumptions, the data, the models, and the unknowns behind each mechanism by which solar variability may impact climate variability. None of these mechanisms can adequately explain global warming observed since the 1950s. However, several of them do impact climate variability, in particular on a regional level.This handbook aims at addressing these issues in a factual way, and thereby challenge the reader to sharpen his/her critical thinking in a debate that is frequently distorted by unfounded claims.

It's New Year's Day, 2101. Somehow, humanity survived the worst of global warming—the higher temperatures and sea levels and the more intense droughts and storms—and succeeded in stabilizing the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gas concentrations are peaking and are expected to drift downward in the 22nd century. The rise in global temperatures is slowing and the natural world is gradually healing. The social contract largely held. And humanity as a whole is better fed, healthier, and more prosperous today than it was a century ago. This scenario of an imagined future raises a key question: What must we do in the 21st century to make such a future possible, and to head off the kind of climate catastrophe that many scientists now see as likely? This question inspires the theme of the Worldwatch Institute's State of the World 2009 report: how climate change will play out over the coming century, and what steps we most urgently need to take now.

Under certain scenarios on the subject of CO2 emissions, by the end of the century the atmospheric concentration could triple its pre-industrial level. The very large numerical models intended to anticipate the corresponding climate evolutions are designed and quantified from the laws of physics. However, little is generally known about these: genesis of clouds, terms of the greenhouse effect, solar activity intervention, etc. This book deals with the issue of climate modeling in a different way: using proven techniques for identifying black box-type models. Taking climate observations from throughout the millennia, the global models obtained are validated statistically and confirmed by the resulting simulations. This book thus brings constructive elements that can be reproduced by anyone adept at numerical simulation, whether an expert climatologist or not. It is accessible to any reader interested in the issues of climate change.

This updated and revised new edition of Assessing Climate Change deals with the full gamut of essential questions in relation to global warming and climate change, uniquely providing a balanced and impartial discussion of this controversial subject. It shows that most of what is “known”about the Sun, historical climates and projections for the future lacks foundation and leaves great room for doubt.Assessing Climate Change (3rd Edition) examines the credibility of the global climate models which accuse greenhouse gases of causing the temperature rise of the 20th century, and provides a better understanding of the uncertainties regarding what might lie ahead in the future. Carefully considering the “evidence” brought forward by both alarmists and skeptics, this book:• has been brought completely up to date to end 2013;• examines the measurements of near surface temperatureson Earth and how much we can rely on them;• includes hundreds of graphs showing the data;• compares the current global warming trend with past climate fluctuations;• provides a systematic review of climate change in nearly all of its aspects;• expands the discussion of potential impacts of global warming (from whatever cause);• includes nearly 1000 references specific to the climate literature.

'Climate change? Global warming?'... We've probably all heard these words over and over again, from media reporters, from elected officials, and even from friends and co-workers. Scientists argue about what they mean for our future.What is the truth? How can we decipher exactly what really are the effects of environmental damage? Where can we go to get dependable, clearly-written information so we can join in the conversation and take the right action?THE CURIOSITY GUIDE TO GLOBAL WARMING fills that need, with a scientifically accurate introduction to perhaps the most important issue of our time. It unravels the mysteries of nature and settles any issue of'reasonable doubt'about the reality of global climate change.Dr. Ernest Zebrowski, a prominent scientist and educator, examines everything from melting glaciers and disappearing snow covers to increased levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere; patterns of climate change through the centuries, and the potentially disastrous effects (including rising seas, more violent storms, and alterations in agricultural productivity) of environmental damage.If you need to understand what's in the news, in print and on line about this subject, this is the one book to read.

An internationally recognized expert on the geology of barrier islands, Orrin H. Pilkey is one of the rare academics who engages in public advocacy about science-related issues. He has written dozens of books and articles explaining coastal processes to lay readers, and he is a frequent and outspoken interviewee in the mainstream media. Here, the colorful scientist takes on climate change deniers in an outstanding and much-needed primer on the science of global change and its effects.After explaining the greenhouse effect, Pilkey, writing with son Keith, turns to the damage it is causing: sea level rise, ocean acidification, glacier and sea ice melting, changing habitats, desertification, and the threats to animals, humans, coral reefs, marshes, and mangroves. These explanations are accompanied by Mary Edna Fraser's stunning batiks depicting the large-scale arenas in which climate change plays out.The Pilkeys directly confront and rebut arguments typically advanced by global change deniers. Particularly valuable are their discussions of “Climategate,” a manufactured scandal that undermined respect for the scientific community, and the denial campaigns by the fossil fuel industry, which they compare to the tactics used by the tobacco companies a generation ago to obfuscate findings on the harm caused by cigarettes.

The impact on climate from 200 years of industrial development is an everyday fact of life, but did humankind's active involvement in climate change really begin with the industrial revolution, as commonly believed? Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum has sparked lively scientific debate since it was first published--arguing that humans have actually been changing the climate for some 8,000 years--as a result of the earlier discovery of agriculture.The'Ruddiman Hypothesis'will spark intense debate. We learn that the impact of farming on greenhouse-gas levels, thousands of years before the industrial revolution, kept our planet notably warmer than if natural climate cycles had prevailed--quite possibly forestalling a new ice age.Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum is the first book to trace the full historical sweep of human interaction with Earth's climate. Ruddiman takes us through three broad stages of human history: when nature was in control; when humans began to take control, discovering agriculture and affecting climate through carbon dioxide and methane emissions; and, finally, the more recent human impact on climate change. Along the way he raises the fascinating possibility that plagues, by depleting human populations, also affected reforestation and thus climate--as suggested by dips in greenhouse gases when major pandemics have occurred. While our massive usage of fossil fuels has certainly contributed to modern climate change, Ruddiman shows that industrial growth is only part of the picture. The book concludes by looking to the future and critiquing the impact of special interest money on the global warming debate. In the afterword, Ruddiman explores the main challenges posed to his hypothesis, and shows how recent investigations and findings ultimately strengthen the book's original claims.

An unbiased and comprehensive overview, based on the findings of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Using no jargon, it looks at tackling and adapting to man-made climate change, and works through the often confusing potential solutions. Bert Metz is the former co-chair of the IPCC, at the center of international climate change negotiations. His insider expertise provides a cutting edge assessment of issues at the top of the political agenda. He leads the reader succinctly through ambitious mitigation scenarios, in combination with adapting our future societies to different climate conditions and the potential costs of these measures. Illustrations and extensive boxed examples motivate students to engage with this essential global debate, and questions for each chapter are available online for course instructors. Minimal technical language also makes this book valuable to anyone with an interest in action to combat climate change.

The science behind global warming, and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere, to measure it, to trace its past, and to model its future.Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, “sound science.” In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these skeptics: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations—even from satellites, which can “see” the whole planet with a single instrument—becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world's climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere—to measure it, trace its past, and model its future.

This book provides an assessment of the effects of climate change on U.S. agriculture, land resources, and biodiversity. It is one of a series of 21 Synthesis and Assessment Products (SAP) that are being produced under the auspices of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). This book builds on an extensive scientific literature and series of recent assessments of the historical and potential impacts of climate change and climate variability on managed and unmanaged ecosystems and their constituent biota and processes. It discusses the nation's ability to identify, observe, and monitor the stresses that influence agriculture, land resources, water resources, and biodiversity, and evaluates the relative importance of these stresses and how they are likely to change in the future. It identifies changes in resource conditions that are now being observed, and examines whether these changes can be attributed in whole or part to climate change. The general time horizon for this book is from the recent past through the period 2030-2050, although longer-term results out to 2100 are also considered. There is robust scientific consensus that human-induced climate change is occurring. Records of temperature and precipitation in the United States show trends consistent with the current state of global-scale understanding and observations of change. Observations also show that climate change is currently impacting the nation's ecosystems and services in significant ways, and those alterations are very likely to accelerate in the future, in some cases dramatically. Current observational capabilities are considered inadequate to fully understand and address the future scope and rate of change in all ecological sectors. Additionally, the complex interactions between change agents such as climate, land use alteration, and species invasion create dynamics that confound simple causal relationships and will severely complicate the development and assessment of mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Schneider persuasively outlines a plan to avert the building threat and develop a positive, practical policy that will bring climate change back under our control, help the economy with a new generation of green energy jobs and productivity, and reduce the dependence on unreliable exporters of oil, and thus ensure a future for ourselves and our planet that's as rich with promise as our past.

Climate change threatens all people, but its adverse effects will be felt most acutely by the world's poor. Absent urgent action, new threats to food security, public health, and other societal needs may reverse hard-fought human development gains. Climate Change and Global Poverty makes concrete recommendations to integrate international development and climate protection strategies. It demonstrates that effective climate solutions must empower global development, while poverty alleviation itself must become a central strategy for both mitigating emissions and reducing global vulnerability to adverse climate impacts.

This meticulously documented call-to-action reveals extensive scientific evidence that the global warming crisis is far worse than officially indicated — and that we're almost at the point of no return. Serious climate-change impacts are already happening: large ice-sheets are disintegrating, sea-level rises will reach 5 metres this century, and we are seeing devastating species loss. It is no longer a case of how much more we can ‘safely'emit, but whether we can stop emissions and produce a deliberate cooling before the Earth's climate system reaches a point beyond any hope of human restoration. These imperatives are incompatible with ‘politics as usual'and ‘business as usual'— we face a sustainability emergency that urgently requires a clear break from the politics of failure-inducing compromise.

Supported by in-depth scientific evidence, Singer and Avery present the compelling concept that global temperatures have been rising mostly or entirely because of a natural cycle. Unstoppable Global Warming explains why we're warming, why it's not very dangerous, and why we can't stop it anyway.

Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast is a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of global warming. Written in an accessible style, this important book examines the processes of climate change and climate stability, from the distant past to the distant future. Examining the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle, and what the future may hold for global climate, this text draws on a wide range of disciplines, and summarizes not only scientific evidence, but also economic and policy issues, related to global warming. A companion web site at (http://understandingtheforecast.org) pr.

Global change assessments inform decision makers about the scientific underpinnings of a range of environmental issues, such as climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and loss of biodiversity. Dozens of assessments have been conducted to date by various U.S. and international groups, many of them influencing public policies, technology development, and research directions. This report analyzes strengths and weaknesses of eight past assessments to inform future efforts. Common elements of effective assessments include strong leadership, extensive engagement with interested and affected parties, a transparent science-policy interface, and well defined communication strategies. The report identifies 11 essential elements of effective assessments and recommends that future assessments include decision support tools that make use of information at the regional and local level where decisions are made.

How members of college and university communities can take action on climate change: strategies, projects, and lessons in how to motivate complex organizations to make changes.Universities and colleges are in a unique position to take a leadership role on global warming. As communities, they can strategize and organize effective action. As laboratories for learning and centers of research, they can reduce their own emissions of greenhouse gases, educate students about global warming, and direct scholarly attention to issues related to climate change and energy. Degrees That Matter offers practical guidance for those who want to harness the power of universities and other institutions, and provides perspectives on how to motivate change and inspire action within complex organizations.The authors, drawing on almost a decade of experience leading the Tufts Climate Initiative and other institutional'greening'efforts, provide both the basic facts and more detailed information about climate issues. Some chapters can be used as stand-alone action guides for specific areas, while others put climate action in scientific, economic, and political contexts. The authors discuss the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions on campus and the importance of an emissions inventory for setting goals and strategies. They consider decision making (and decision makers), costs, budgets, and institutional priorities, and describe different emission reduction projects. They look at the importance of master planning for the university and the value of action by individual community members. Finally, they suggest climate action projects for the classroom and offer guidance for tapping student energy. Their aim is to inspire others to take on global warming regardless of organizational setting.

Are the often alarming claims about global warming based on science and justified by the facts? Is the human race really facing a major crisis due to emissions from fossil fuels? Would the proposed Climate Treaty solve a real environmental threat or would it create worldwide economic and social harm? S. Fred Singer is a distinguished astrophysicist who has taken a hard, scientific look at the evidence. In this new book, Dr. Singer explores the inaccuracies in historical climate data, the limitations of attempting to model climate on computers, solar variability and its impact on climate, the effects of clouds, ocean currents, and sea levels on global climate, and factors that could mitigate any human impacts on world climate.Singer's masterful analysis decisively shows that the pessimistic, and often alarming, global warming scenarios depicted in the media have no scientific basis. In fact, he finds that many aspects of any global warming, such as a longer growing season for food and a reduced need to use fossil fuels for heating, would actually have a positive impact on the human race. Further, Singer notes how many proposed “solutions” to the global warming “crisis” (like “carbon” taxes) would have severe consequences for economically disadvantaged groups and nations.According to Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hot Talk, Cold Science dares to point out that ‘the Emperor has no clothes.'Is there evidence to suggest discernible human influence on global climate? Of great interest, this book demonstrates that, at best, the evidence is sketchy and incomplete. Hot Talk, Cold Science is essential reading for anyone who wants to be fully informed about the global warming debate.